Teacher's first novel wins Vogel Award

A high school teacher is the winner of this year's Vogel Literary Award for a gritty coming-of-age novel set in AFL-obsessed Melbourne of the 1980s.

From a field of 150 manuscripts, the $20,000 prize went to Paul D Carter for his unpublished work Eleven Seasons - a nine-year-long labour of love.

"By day, I've been telling my students how fun, playful and reaffirming creative writing is," he said at the award ceremony in Sydney.

"By night, I've been mooning over two 15-page editorial reports I received and at times cursing my novel's very existence."

Eleven Seasons tells the story of a fatherless teenage boy growing up in an urban jungle of lower middle-class drinking and awkward sexual encounters with footy at its centre.

Describing his win as a surreal experience, Carter says he is not giving up his day job.

"On the one hand, I love teaching," he said.

"The interaction with young people and the opportunity to share my ideas with them and hear their ideas is awesome, but it's also given me great fuel for my future writing. My next book's probably going to be about education."

He says his novel was almost a decade in the making.

"It actually took me nine years to write," he said.

"This winning of the Vogel Award is amazingly validating and utterly surreal."